Isidore Dyen, Professor Emeritus of Malayo-Polynesian and Comparative Linguistics at Yale University, passed away on 14th December 2008 at the age of 95. He was one of the foremost scholars in the field of Austronesian linguistics whose numerous publications have considerably contributed to the advancement of our knowledge on the history of the Austronesian language family and on the structure of some of its member languages.

Dyen began his academic career at the University of Pennsylvania where he obtained his PhD in Indo-European linguistics in 1939 with a dissertation entitled ‘The Sanskrit Indeclinables’. It was the Second World War which caused Dyen to extend his linguistic interests to Austronesian languages. After having moved to Yale University, he was exempted from US military service on condition that he learn a Southeast Asian language and write text books for soldiers. His choice of Malay for this project led him to contact native speakers, most of them sailors, who were living illegally in New York. After promising not to report them to the immigration authorities, he was able to study Malay with his informants and he soon achieved enough fluency to be able to teach the language to the troops.

After the war, this preoccupation with Malay persuaded him to choose Austronesian linguistics as his new focus of linguistic studies. Nonetheless, he continued to bridge the academic distance between these specialties with his studies on both language families; for example, he wrote a lengthy essay tracing the origin of Malay tiga ‘three’ to Prakrit tiga ‘triad’. He continued his work on the grammar of Malay and, during various fieldwork trips to the Pacific (1947, 1949), he collected data on Micronesian languages such as Trukese and Yapese. Having first concentrated on the description of Austronesian languages, he soon began to carry out intensive research on the reconstruction of Proto-Austronesian and the classification of Austronesian languages.

His first significant contributions to the reconstruction of Austronesian were the revisions he proposed for Dempwolff’s reconstructions of PAn proto-phonemes (e.g. PAn *Z, *D, *R, laryngeals) and the rediscovery of the importance of Formosan evidence for some new PAn phonemes. The numerous reconstructions he suggested for PAn proto-phonemes, distinguished only by subscript numerals (e.g. *S1, S2, etc.), were challenged by some colleagues, but he defended this method of reconstruction by arguing that these elements represented only tentative phonemes which later might be explained as cases of undetected borrowing or the results of other factors. His main purpose was to provide a complete inventory of correspondences, even though he knew that not all these subscript phonemes could represent proto-phonemes, since such an assumption would have led to an inflationary PAn phonemic system.

Two of Dyen’s views triggered fierce disputes with other Austronesianists, namely the position of the Formosan languages in the Austronesian language family and the validity of lexicostatistics as a means for the classification of languages. Whereas Dyen held on to his view that the Formosan languages belong with the western languages in a group he called ‘Hesperonesian’, with the Philippine languages as their closest relative, most other scholars now adhere to the Formosan hypothesis which regards the Formosan languages as a separate group, distinct from all remaining Austronesian languages that comprise a single group or branch of the family. As for lexicostatistics, Dyen was convinced that quantitative evidence served as a solid method for classifying languages. His consistent reliance on this rather controversial methodology was demonstrated by the fact that his lexicostatistical classification of Austronesian languages, published in 1965, was followed by one of his last major publications, a lexicostatistical classification of the Indo-European language family in 1992. He produced the latter study despite the fact that many colleagues had already straightforwardly rejected this method as a valid tool of comparative linguistics after the 1965 book. Nonetheless, he defended his views with all his energy and did not avoid open confrontations.

The appreciation of Dyen’s stimulating scholarship was acknowledged by the Austronesian community, when the festschrift I edited in his honor was published. Many colleagues contributed to that volume, which Byron Bender presented to him during an Austronesian Circle meeting at the University of Hawai’i in 1996. Upon receiving the book, he simply asked ‘What is this for?’ -- with his typical penchant for dry understatement.

Dyen was not only an active researcher, but also a productive advisor who could be very thorough and rough in individual discussions with his doctoral candidates sitting across from him at his office desk, always stacked with books, notes, papers and file cards. Seven graduate students went through this schooling and became successful scholars, most of them in the field of Austronesian linguistics: Alan Stevens, W. Keith Percival, John U. Wolff, Paul D. Black, Shigeru Tsuchida, Curtis D. McFarland, and myself. Let me close by citing one of the phrases he kept on using when his students put forth hypotheses which he regarded as shaky: ‘You know…, anything is possible!’.